HTC Announces the 4.7" HTC One 1080P Phone with Ultrapixel Camera

HTC today announced their newest flagship phone, simply called the HTC One. This phone has been originally rumored as the HTC M7 and some of the latest leaked photos actually nailed the product shots on the dot.

The HTC One is simply a culmination of all of the work HTC has done over the years in terms of design and hardware functionality. It is a 4.7" phone with a 1080P screen, which amounts to a resolution of 468 PPI, the highest of any phone ever. Yet, internally, the phone is equally impressive featuring a 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chip and 2GB of RAM, which was recently announced at CES 2013 by Qualcomm. It features the same GPU as the APQ8064, however, there is a good chance that the GPU will have a higher clock than the APQ8064 in the 1080P Droid DNA.

Going beyond the expected Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and 32GB of standard internal storage (64GB also available), HTC has invested a lot of time and money into the camera and sound of the HTC One. All of this is powered by a 2300 mAh Li-Poly battery, which should be enough to get full-day use out of the phone.

The HTC BoomSound integrates Beats Audio with dual frontal speakers with built-in amplifiers and an ‘HDR Microphone’ and Sense Voice to create wholesome. The real focus, no pun intended, is HTC’s Ultrapixel Camera. This camera is designed to deliver impeccable low-light perfomance as well as quick and sharp photos as a result of having a significantly smaller pixel pitch in the image sensor. HTC talks about how important having smaller pixels allows for more precise light capturing. A good explanation of why pixel size matters can be found here.

The Ultrapixel Camera itself has a BSI sensor with a pixel pitch/pixel size of 2?m on a 1/3′ sensor. HTC has also included their HTC ImageChip 2 to improve the responsiveness of the sensor to certain objects. The lens itself on the camera has a f/2.0 aperture, which should result in some impressively quick photos that are also very sharp. However, overdoing the bokeh on the photos may be a problem for some if they continually use the 28mm lens at f/2.0. The camera also has OIS, a nearly standard feature, and smart flash. They also improved the front camera by including an 88 degree wide viewing angle and 1080P video capturing which was inherited from the Droid DNA (HTC Butterfly). It will also have continuous shooting and VideoPic (GIF image shooting, essentially). There’s also the slow motion video recording with variable speed playback. Finally, HTC backed the camera with a software suite called HTC Zoe, which helps make taking and editing photos and then sharing them, easier.

This phone will support a ton of different carriers including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. The one huge surprise for us is that the HTC One is actually going to be launching on T-Mobile’s LTE network. Most people, including myself, assume that HTC’s version would simply use HSPA+ and not LTE like the others, but this is going to be T-Mobile USA’s first LTE phone and we’re a bit excited to see how fast it’ll be. This phone will support four different bands in the US with AT&T using 700/850/AWS/1900Mhz, T-Mobile using 700MHz/AWS and Sprint using 1900MHz.

These phones will be available on the respective carriers in March for $199.99, but if you sign up now for a preorder, HTC will sweeten the deal.

They will give you at least $100 back for your current phone towards the HTC One. While this may not be a great deal for people with iPhone 4’s or any relatively recent phones, it could be a pretty sweet deal for someone that’s about to end their 2-year contract. It will retail for $200 for the 32GB version and $300 for the 64GB version on contract.